Federico Fellini’s love of theatre would take on great symbolic meaning in his later films, but it emerges quite directly here as the setting of his directorial debut Variety Lights, fuelling the drama between the flighty members of a travelling troupe dreaming of fame, money, and love.
The industrial Italian town that the psychologically troubled Giuliana wanders in Red Desert is an alien landscape of steel beams and suffocating smog, and yet Michelangelo Antonioni’s punctuations of vibrant colour among desaturated greys offer a complex humanity to these daunting structures, painting out a world striving for growth through its own sickness.
By subverting the archaic legends that pass down prejudices from one generation to the next, Nimona recognises the freedom that lies in open-minded acceptance, uniting a fugitive knight and a chaotic shapeshifter against a conspiracy that threatens to destabilise their futuristic, medieval kingdom.
It is not just the fantastical designs and living furniture which imbue the enchanted castle of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast with an air of otherworldly awe, but its illusory logic makes for a dreamscape as inventively surreal as it is fearsome, penetrating deceptive facades of beauty and ugliness that conceal the true nature of our humanity.
Lee Cronin brings a refreshing creativity to Sam Raimi’s demonic horror in Evil Dead Rise, as he allegorically twists the image of a loving family into that of dysfunctional household, and lays into the terror of seeing one’s mother transform into a hideous, abusive creature.
It is a cruel twist of irony that sees writer Monk Ellison’s parody of exploitative Black novels exalted as a serious piece of literature in American Fiction, and one which Cord Jefferson wields impressive self-awareness over, sharply satirising the liberal elite’s attempts to assuage their white guilt by gleefully consuming African American trauma in media.
Denis Villeneuve’s extraordinary adaptation of Frank Herbert’s unfathomably vast imagination incidentally demonstrates his own in Dune: Part Two, further developing his elemental worldbuilding and biblical iconography through the darkly subverted monomyth of a prophesied Messiah, and pushing the parable’s cinematic spectacle to astonishingly creative lengths.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist odyssey ventures into the surreal heart of womanhood, Chad Stahelski lifts the John Wick franchise to transcendent new heights, and Barbenheimer draws crowds to the cinema for a double feature of conflicting blockbusters.
The working-class lovers of Fallen Leaves may be set back by personal flaws, but the string of unlucky coincidences playing a greater cosmic joke on them can’t be ignored either, as Aki Kaurismäki’s minimalist comedy-drama stubbornly seeks romance within the deadpan mundanity of downtown Helsinki.
It is in the anarchic rejuvenation of animation itself that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem fully embraces the rebellious spirit of its outcast heroes, emulating the sort of colourful scrawls and grungy imperfections that might be found in a teenager’s sketchbook, and vividly manifesting the coming-of-age tale which underlies its kinetic superhero action.
